THE ARRIVAL OF television anchor and radio host Dan Patrick at Sports Illustrated, according to Josh Levin, only signifies SI's fall into irrelevance.The magazine, Levin writes in the online mag Slate, is now indistinguishable from its competition. The writing is boring, the stories are lame and the only reason SI survives is because of brand loyalty.
He writes: In pandering to the sort of people who (allegedly) care about Dane Cook's thoughts on George Steinbrenner, Sports Illustrated is allowing market research to masquerade as editorial judgment.
What happened to sportswriting? Has television made sportswriting - in newspapers and magazines - irrelevant? In the modern era, we have SportsCenter, Daily News Live, and that wonderful thing called the Internet. Do we need sportswriters to explain stuff to us in print when we already know the scores, we've already heard their analysis on TV and we've read the rumors online?
Robert Huber wrote this in Philadelphia magazine last year: Even our best writers now, like the Inquirer’s Bob Ford and David Aldridge and Daily News columnist Rich Hofmann, are no longer necessary — we don’t have to go to them in the morning, to find out what they have to say.
Should the newspapers provide greater analysis? Should sportswriters write their opinions? Do you care about their opinions?
Should Sports Illustrated move beyond the big plays of the game and now provide more cultural impact of sports? Wouldn't that be like a hip-hop magazine writing about fashion and urban violence rather than new artists?
How can sportswriting survive? Or is it's death just an exaggeration?
3 comments:
Enea said ...
I think that sports writers should not write their opinions. We do not read newpapers and magazines because we want to hear other people's oppinions. We read newspapers and magazines because we want to know what happened.
I think sports writers SHOULD write their opinions. Watching television to hear the scores or checking the internet doesn't provide us with any source of entertainment; it's just the same straight-scoop with no excitement, no detail, only straight fact. Everyone reads magazines and newspapers for a different reason. If we didn't read magazines for someone's opinion, magazines like People and Rolling Stone would be dead, off the shelves. But we do not always want just the straight-up news, we want to be enticed by our news, it's how one develops 'preferences' to their reading materials.
of course we still need SL..if the writing is boring then get some young new exciting writer that truly have a passion for Sports journalism..there a ton of them at Temple...anyways there will allways be a place for SL
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